Then suddenly without any warning whatever the curtain was rung up on a psychological tragedy; for Philip, by some species of spiritual infection from his wife, began to develop an imagination. It did not at first threaten to attack what Phœbe in a Gallic moment had once called their “_vie intérieure_,” by which she meant their literary labours, but was directly concerned only with the present of a safety razor which she had made him on his birthday, in order to save cotton-wool and his life-blood. This safety razor consisted of a neat little sort of a rake into which razor blades were fitted. Each of these, when blunted by use, was to be thrown away and a fresh one inserted, and that morning, Philip, finding that his blade had begun to lose its edge, tossed it lightly and airily out of his dressing-room window, from which it fell into a herbaceous border which ran along the house. The new blade gave the utmost satisfaction, and precisely at nine-thirty he lit his first pipe and began his work for the day on Phœbe’s scenario. The dining-room was just below his dressing-room, and at that moment there came a rustle from the herbaceous bed, and Phœbe’s adorable Persian cat leaped on to the window-sill from outside, and proceeded to make its toilet in the warm May sunshine. And at that precise and fatal moment Philip Partington’s imagination began to work. It stirred within him like the first faint pang of a toothache. For some quarter of an hour he refused to recognize its existence, and proceeded to clothe in suitable language the flight of Eva up the frozen Thames in an ice-ship. Not knowing exactly what an ice-ship was, and being aware that his readers would be similarly ignorant, he evolved a beautiful one out of his inner consciousness that “skimmed along” on a single runner like a skate. It was not, he reflected, any less likely that it should keep its balance than that a bicycle should.... Suddenly he laid down his pen. His imagination was beginning to hurt him. It would be a terrible thing if Phœbe’s cat, while it prowled though the herbaceous bed, stepped on the blade of the safety razor. Blunt though it was for shaving purposes, it would easily inflict a cruel wound on Tommy’s paw. When his work was done, he must really hunt for the blade, and bestow it in some safer place. He took up his pen again and wrote, “Ever faster through the deepening winter twilight sped the ice-ship, and Eva controlling the tiller in her long taper fingers, watched the dusky banks fly past her. ‘Oh, God,’ she murmured, ‘grant that I may be in time!’ The woods of Richmond....”